Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic: Bruni already got the chance to talk up his own kiddie bulimia in the NYT mag. Just the beginning! He'll be talking about it on Nightline on August 19. Sample transcript quote:

[Nightline]: You were 8 years old on the Atkins Diet?

Bruni: Yeah… the Atkins Diet came out in hardcover when I was 8, if I have my arithmetic correct. ‘Cause I remember mom bought it in hardcover so this was serious stuff and I remember leafing through it and learning about ketones and ketosis and you know, having no idea what that meant, I was 8 years old, but I thought, ooo that's profound stuff. If I can get into this ketosis thing I'll be home free. I'll be skinny.

Bruni is now the Food Critic With Food Issues.

Jill Abramson, managing editor: Not just managing editor for news; managing editor for puppies, too! She is the Serious News Lady With a Smooshy Marshmallow Puppy Center.

Alex Kuczynski, former shopping columnist: Rich Botox Lady Who Will Talk About Same, Endlessly.

David Carr, media critic: The Marlboro Man of Media. With a heart of gold!

Jennifer 8 Lee, metro reporter: Hard-Working Internet Addict Who Loves Chinese Food.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Dealbook columnist: Wunderkind Who Could Totally Be a Rich I-Banker But Isn't Yet. The next Steven Rattner?

All The Opinion Columnists: Suave Expert on [Made Up Topic] But a Snazzier Writer Than Usual! Also, too rich!

And of course, the one future Self-Brand we'd like to see speaks for itself:

AG Sulzberger: Baller.

Graydon Carter, who was the founding editor at the Observer, noted that Kaplan lasted far longer than he thought he would: "I think it's one of his great accomplishments that he managed more than a dozen years with Arthur (Carter)...My version was the black-and-white sketch of what he did, but he gave it color and vibrancy that I never got a chance to."

New York Times rich people reporter Alex Kuczynski couldn't get an in at the place for a while: "'I was like 23 or 24, and I kept sending these blind pitches to the masthead, signing them Alex Kuczynski. And, finally, after a year, Peter apparently stands up in a meeting and says, "Somebody call this guy Kuczynski.'" He also put a little bit of juju on Kucznski's tenure at the Times: "When I left for the Times, he kept smacking his forehead. "Alex! Alex! Alex! You're making a huge mistake!" He has this habit of smacking his forehead. "You'll never write in the first person. You'll never write about yourself. You'll never write with color. You'll never use any interesting language. Or at least I highly doubt it."

Finally, former Observer senior editor and (as of recently, former) Rolling Stone deputy editor Jason Gay remembers one of Kaplan's more distinct skills: "His gift for headlines is unmatched. Do you remember the piece George Gurley wrote about Ann Coulter, where she joked about Timothy McVeigh neglecting to bomb the Times? Peter stared at the screen for hours trying to come up with the exact right line. We'd settled on a pretty lame headline, but at the last minute, Peter's face looked like it was about to explode. "COULTERGEIST!" he said."

Kaplan's on his way to Conde Nast Traveler, where his first day as creative director is Monday. He served as a mentor to many a New York reporter, "many of whom now populate the city's more remunerative newsrooms," writes Oxfeld, and it's true - even current Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder is among them. Snyder's tribute to Kaplan's legacy on this site is here, Oxfeld's piece is here. Both are must-reads for New York Media junkies. The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Kaplan - who oversaw the Observer's flimsy entry into the Internet Age - is inevitably going to have to work with Traveler's digital strategy; he claimed in the aforementioned Snyder post that he's excited about this, but really, you gotta wonder what's in it for him other than a steady paycheck, and more time with his family (the original reason he gave for leaving the Observer before speculation arose that owner and heir-about-town Jared Kusher pushed him out). That could well be enough for Kaplan, who nobody's ever accused of being lazy or phoning it in. He's worked for a long, long time, and he's probably tired. But for a guy who spends that kind of time in the newsroom, reporting on a world he loved as much as he influenced and covered, isn't he going to get restless? Kaplan's story in New York's media timeline, and his reach on it, can't quite be over yet. Not like this, anyway.

Peter Kaplan at the Observer: An Oral History [Daily Intel]

Maybe if this young woman had been donating her eggs to buy groceries Ms. Kuczynski would have understood that all this reproduction-for-hire was a product of her billionaire-centric world as surely as the Blahniks and Versace she used to trill about — that college and surrogacy are available to people like Ms. Kuczynski and not to others because that's how our system works.

Instead she tells us, very sincerely, how much she enjoyed spending the last few months before the child arrived "by white-water rafting down Level 10 rapids on the Colorado River" — presumably Level 10 rapids are really quality rapids — "racing down a mountain at 60 miles per hour at ski-racing camp, drinking bourbon and going to the Super Bowl." She also does a lot of "Bikram yoga," which is presumably a really quality form of yoga.

What she doesn't tell us is even more revealing. Of the story's nearly 8,000 words, there are only three quotations from the surrogate mother. Ms. Kuczynski does not describe this remarkable woman's clothes or, really, tell us her thoughts about much of anything. About Ms. Kuczynski's own feelings and fears and cravings we get paragraph after maudlin paragraph. The one who does the labor is almost completely silent.

Oh snap! Way to stick it to those plutocrats! They might be able to have their way with the Times, but they'll get no love from the Wall Street Journal opinion section!

Wait, what?

Oddest. Newspaper. Class war. Ever.

Kuczynski, 40, is married to Charles Stevenson, a rich investor 20 years her senior. I.V.F. failed the couple and natural pregnancies ended in miscarriages. They switched their attention, then, to surrogacy. Specifically, to gestational surrogacy, in which "the surrogate mother is carrying a child genetically unrelated to her." Alex encountered, during this process, the class system! "We encountered the wink-nod rule: Surrogates would never say they were motivated to carry a child for another couple just for money; they were all motivated by altruism. This gentle hypocrisy allows surrogacy to take place. Without it, both sides would have to acknowledge the deep cultural revulsion against attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life."

But:

We had the money to pay. My husband is a very successful investor; I have made a healthy income for a writer. We were lucky in that we could afford to do what most infertile couples cannot. The questions for us were philosophical. I suppose I could have decided that it was my destiny to remain childless, that it was somehow meant to be. But I hate the phrase “meant to be,” loaded with its small, smug assumptions, its apathy and fake stoicism. I believe that where things can be fixed, they should be fixed. In our case, reproductive technology could make it relatively easy for us to have our biological child.

And, at that moment, having a biologically related child felt necessary. What began as wistful longing in my 20s had blistered into a mad desire that seemed to defy logic. The compulsion to create our own bloodline seemed medieval, and I knew we could enjoy our marriage — our lives — without a child. Yet I couldn’t argue myself out of my desire. A child with our genes would be a part of us. My husband’s face would be mirrored in our child’s face, proof that our love not only existed, but could be recreated beyond us. Die without having created a life, and die two deaths: the death of yourself, and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.

Thankfully, they found an eminently qualified woman to carry the baby. Cathy is married to a VP of marketing for a credit union! She is intelligent, and her answers to the surrogate questionnaire "were not handwritten in the tiny alloted spaces." She wrote a really good essay. Not just any biologically competent womb can carry a Kuczynski. Despite the fact that all the involved genetic material came from Alex and her husband, surrogate mother Cathy's husband's college degree comes up as an important factor. As does the couple's "renovated mill house on a creek in a suburb of Philadelphia."

Things went sour when Cathy went to Las Vegas, and the unborn baby learned the horrors of commercial air travel and gambling, but everything turned out fine in the end, and they have a beautiful baby boy with a slightly ridiculous inherited name (Maxime), and good for them. Alex still has terrible nightmares about how she didn't deliver the baby all by herself, but hey, at least it is genetically the product of her and her husband, and not some dumb adopted baby.

She backed out of fashion designer Dian von Furstenberg's recent charity spelling bee (that this exists at all brings immeasurable joy/worry to my heart) and her usual consumerism-crazy Times articles have been in short supply these past few months. In fact, her most recent article was a review of actor Alec Baldwin's new book, I Never Promised You a Rainbow A Promise to Ourselves. And what is that book about? D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

Sad if it's true. Though on the bright side, maybe it would leave her more time for fabulous shopping trips and, erm, Idaho orgies.

"This is a Doug fir," he said, using wood-man lingo for Douglas fir.

Oooh, inside jargon! After tasting the lumberjack's salty lingo, Alex begins working his old, hard trunk:

I ran my hands across its width, feeling the ridges of decades upon decades, stopping at the heart of the trunk, a pale circle the circumference of my pinky that represented its first year of life.

"So, could someone just come in and by this?" I asked.

Birch shook his head... "It would have to be the right client, with the right idea..."

"Even for, like, $100,000?"

He shook his head again.

Six figures for some many-decades-old wood? Alex is clearly desperate to pound some, uh, nails before her surrogate baby comes and ends all her wood-related fun.

Kuczynski goes on to talk to this poor man about his wood for many more paragraphs than is strictly necessary. We never find out if he sells her his wood, only that she titled her T magazine piece "Fir Fetish."

Times: The Hot Material In Home Building Is Old Wood

A tipster asks, "will the spawn have Kucz's real nose?" And we want to know: is Alex really incapable of carrying her own child to term or does she just not want to? An unfair question perhaps, especially to ask of a 40-year-old woman (is it also unfair to mention that? Pretty sure her birthday was a couple weeks ago!), but a look at the Kucz's work and public statements presents a character who might just not want some sort of fattening, nutrient-sucking monster gestating in her toned stomach.

Back in 2004, Alex presented us with one of her trademark anecdotal investigations into the things her rich friend talk about at lunch. The subject: Pregnancy Paranoia. Did you know that you have to give up certain of life's pleasures during the nine months of pregnancy? It's true! Rich women have read as much on the Internets!

''Well, you know you can't wear an underwire bra,'' one young mother announced.

''No thong underwear,'' said Cricket Burns, the style director of Quest magazine and a mother of two.

''Or Botox,'' chimed in another young mother.

Mushrooms, said Jessica Friedberg, a mother of two perfect ZIP-code-10021 children.

The warnings tumbled forth: Tanning spray. Hair dryers. Acrylic nails. The J. Sisters. Cellphones. Then the waiters delivered dessert, a gooey chocolate soufflé with a mousse center and a side of crème anglaise.

Ms. Burns looked down, and in a voice lowered to the tone a Norad officer might use to announce the approach of nuclear warheads, said: ''And . . . no . . . chocolate . . . mousse.''

And salmon! And sushi! Why on Earth would any person ever want to do this to themselves? Especially where there are fools out there willing to take that fetus off your hands until its ready to be cooed over and swaddled in diamond-encrusted imported silk blankets.

Congrats Alex and Charles!

Journo Awaits Stork [NYP]
The Nine Months of Living Anciously [NYT]

Ira Silverberg, the fun-loving literary agent who organized this event on behalf of the CLMP, thanked everyone for showing up to support the organization. The CLMP exists to help small presses and lit mags at a time of unprecedented "conglomeration in book publishing," he informed us.

Jonathan Burnham—former Miramax Books honcho!—nodded sagely.

Then Ira introduced the evening's MC, his husband Bob Morris, who has that column in the Times about being a crotchety gay who is annoyed by email and babies and stuff. Bob in turn introduced the bee's judge, OED editor Jesse Sheidlower, who is the very definition of geek hot.

"Jesse is the top in this relationship," Bob told us, in what was to be the first of many adorably supergay, but sort of eldergay, double-entendres of the evening.

Seriously, imagine an elementary school spelling bee crossed with some sort of outtake scene from "Tales of The City" and there you go.

Jonathan Burnham was first up. He aced "pergola." Easy! Especially because he is British.

Things were about to get much tougher, though. The author Colin Channer misspelled "millennium." Then Michael Cunningham ("one of the tallest and most beautiful men in this room, and also he won a Pulitzer!" per Bob) also misspelled millennium. Paula Froelich was up next, and she flubbed millennium too! This, however, might have been hara-kiri: "That's how we spell it at Page Six," she told the audience, and scampered out the door with her date. (He was cute.)

Alex Kuczynski and "Cancer Vixen" author Marisa Marchetto were both eliminated by the word "cappuccino."

"Do you think I need some Botox, Alex?" Marisa asked, before her losing turn. "Leave her alone, she's disgraced," Bob chided. Indeed!

For the rest of the evening, Alex sat in the losers' area, complaining loudly that the other contestants' words were too easy and generally heckling. Occasionally she would get up to bring her fellow losers fresh rounds of drinks. "I just got a drink for Michael Cunningham," she told me starstruckly as she breezed by in a cloud of delicious perfume.

Next to me, New York's Jesse Oxfeld observed that Alex smelled amazing. I wondered aloud what her perfume was. "Money," Jesse said, and then went back to caressing his handheld device.

It's true, Alex does have an awful lot of money. But author Meg Wolitzer has the title of CLMP Spelling Bee reigning champion, and what's really more important?

Following her patented formula, in the first two paragraphs we learn more about her than her subject matter. Here are things we learn about Alex Kuczynski in the first 430 words, followed by the what we learn about shredding machines.

• Alex Kuczynski has been an American Express cardholder for at least a few years.
  
• She once dated a man who sent her billets-doux.
  
• She and said boyfriend went fishing in Nantucket.
  
• She's a Taoist!
  
• She's afraid of being audited.
  
• She owned, up until recently, more than a dozen tennis rackets.
  
• She donated more than 200 books to the homeless.

  What the homeless are going to do with 200 copies of her book Beauty Junkies is anyone's guess. We suggest a bonfire! But the article wasn't all Alex all the time. We also learned this about shredders.

• An Identity Guard 24-sheet strip-cut shredder goes for about $100.

  Well, a 7:1 ratio isn't too bad for the Kucz! Maybe next week we can glean a couple more Alex Kuczynski factoids as seen through the lens of buying a Le Creuset casserole dish.

Nude Awakening [NYT]

For my Obsessions column, which runs in the Times T magazine, I need to think up and ruminate on something obsessive and fascinating going on in either the restaurant, food, design or entertaining world. . . for the next T Design issue. Are there hostesses who now only have all-female dinner parties? Restaurants where they will slaughter a cow/dog/fish in front of your very eyes? A newly designed wineglass sweeping the restaurant world? A vineyard in someone's backyard? Houses designed without entertaining spaces for the socially unadventurous? All-nude dinner parties? Is everyone becoming a vegan? Is there a backlash against expensive sheets? Place cards? Are people flying to Antwerp to eat a special kind of bratwurst? Or whatever they eat in Antwerp? Ants? Werps?

Ideas, people!

Many thanks for any shred of an idea. . . .

Next subject: Art! Any thoughts on art would be greatly appreciated. Anyone want to go to auctions with me in October?

Yours truly,
Alex Kuczynski

A survey of Kuczynski's work reveals a pattern at once troubling and comforting, but a pattern all the same. Understanding it is like receiving a diagnosis for some clearly terminal but as yet unnamed disease: At least you know what to expect in the end but it probably won't make you feel any better.

I. A) The Anecdotal Misdirect
Almost every piece starts off with some bizarre recitation of trivia from her life that inevitably paints her as a precocious and cultured bearer of the high cultural torch. The problem is, this is sort of accurate!

A December 1st, 2005 column, for instance, began with: "I've never enjoyed the holidays. There was the time in eighth grade when my mother wouldn't let me open my presents until I had finished reading 'Sense and Sensibility.' So I sat scowling at the book for three days until finally, on Dec. 28, she relented."

Or, from a column on temporary stores, "I can still remember the first pop-up book of my childhood: Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Emperor's New Clothes.'" Like a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator, what Kuczynski is doing here is distracting you from the real meat of the article in the guise of inviting you in. This is to disguise that she's about to conjure up 1000 words about what she's really supposed to be writing about.

I. B) The Name Drop
The naming of names is a Kuczynski tradition. Now these names range from rock stars to politicos, but all have the same type of lustre in common. This device is sometimes used in conjunction with the misdirect; it sometimes replaces it, and sometimes is merely a component. For instance, in a story about Victoria's Secret in Las Vegas, Kucynzki opens:

I DON'T particularly like the Rolling Stones, mostly because a few years ago I sat behind Keith Richards at a screening of the movie ''Traffic,'' and he kept banging his chair into my shin and never apologized. But a couple of weeks ago, at the urging of friends, I got on an airplane and flew six hours to see the Stones in concert in Las Vegas.

II. The Contortion
In about paragraph three, Kuczynski often orchestrates a weirdly alluring contortion whereby her Uneccessary Anecdote is wrangled into the service of the piece. This is by far the prime cut of her articles. It's here where her actual talent shines. Take, for example, the athletic contortions necessary to work in that bit about Jane Austen to the matter at hand:

I haven't read a page of Jane Austen since. In the annals of instruction this lesson was similar to my third grade gym teacher's telling me to imagine that my family had been kidnapped by terrorists and that the only way to save their lives would be if I did a back flip on the trampoline.

There was more negative reinforcement: I was 21 years old, working at my first job in book publishing, and my task on Dec. 23 was to escort Jackie Mason to a book signing at Macy's. I had never been to Macy's, and I couldn't imagine why none of my co-workers leapt at the chance to spend the night before Christmas Eve in what was surely one of the world's most glamorous, exciting department stores.

The signing was to take place on one of its higher floors. Mr. Mason and I struggled through the crowd to the elevators and found them all choked with humanity. We shoehorned ourselves onto the escalator, ascending into an agitated throng of holiday shoppers, packs of men and women scrambling for the last pair of argyle socks or Cabbage Patch Kid.

I was Dante, Mr. Mason was Virgil, and here we were in the ninth circle of hell: Macy's, two nights before Christmas.

III. The Rest
Then so often her and our interest wanes. It only takes on average four sentences about the resonance of Bloomie's or the changing rooms at Loehmann's for us to turn the page. Hell, we rarely even stick around for the conclusion which sometimes, though not at all always, includes a callback to her opening.

For instance, per those pop-up stores, "At home I unwrapped the outfit, piteously, from its organe tissue paper, dreaming the dream of the empress with new clothes, who had none." Get it? Her first pop-up book was the Emperor's New Clothes! Genius.

Exceptions
This distinctive Kuczynksi formula really only came about in the middle of 2005, perhaps a bit later. This is also when she was up to her wattle in plastic surgery, presumably as research for her book Beauty Junkies. Before that, she was an enthusiast of the straight opening.

There are two competing theories on why this is true. The first posits that as she was writing her memoir, Kuczynski became more and more self-obsessed—so by the time it was finished, the only way she could interface with the external world was by accessing some point in her illustrious past.

The other theory is that while some surgeon was mucking about inside Kuczynski's face, they jostled some part of her frontal lobe. The trauma, or, rather, "change," enlarged her ego to an extent that, like a solipsist, all she knew and believed in was her mind. She literally can not think about Bloomingdale's without thinking about how a man touched her ladyparts with a tape measure when she was a little girl. (There is a third theory, which has to do with the Styles section of the Times and its editing, but never mind that!)

In the past, such neurological dysfunctions have been known to produce some great writing. Many believe that it was a function of Woody Guthrie's Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and the consequent synaptic changes in his mind that produced his greatest songs.

Whether it be medical malpractice or simply a side effect of writing about oneself, Kuczynski's work has transformed; and because of that, we have gained just a little insight into the luxurious inner workings of a rich woman's brain.

She digs deep: Not only does she interview her own (former, of course, A.K. doesn't go in for that sort of thing anymore) plastic surgeon, but she scores a quote from Men's Health editor and giant male tit Dave Zinczenko. (Now we're in our sweet spot.) While some worry that this expensive procedure (it can cost up to ten grand to dehooterize a plump young man) may be overperformed on those who are still enduring puberty, others have happier anecdotes:

Dr. Robert Kotler, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, Calif., said that his nephew, who is now in his 20s, had breast reduction surgery when he was a teenager.

"My nephew wouldn't take his shirt off in public," Dr. Kotler said. "He wouldn't go to the beach, which in California is a pretty big deal.

"In the past, doctors said, 'Oh, he'll grow out of it.' He decided not to grow out of it, but to have the procedure." The result was astonishing, Dr. Kotler said.

"Here was the shyest, most introverted kid you could ever meet," he said. "And now, well, he's the polar opposite of the shy kid. Guess what he does now? He's a Hollywood agent."

A Sense of Anxiety a Shirt Won't Cover [NYT]